Archive for January, 2014

Bleeding from the mouth, dust in the crook of the elbow; grave dirt and and shit and hair. Antediluvian speak in a language muffled by decrepitude, alone in itself, blanketed in all the glamour of a femur half-buried: Often these descriptives of capital D death metal are bandied about in such easy terms, such boring ruminative, superlative slop — the atavism of metal is more theatrical show tune than resonant reality. “Critics” don’t try to listen as much as narrate. You can’t narrate this. And Antediluvian doesn’t as much shirk such easy bullshit, as trudge away unaware, alive and dead in equal measure — at home in cosmic embryonic fluid, pubic hair matted in gnostic ejaculate, bashing away in starry-eyed worship. Mars Sekhmet’s drumming perversely anti-metal, heavy but delirious under the weight of all that Other; Haasiophis not as much strumming a guitar as smudging his own image up against …Against. They breed together like eels in a murky pond, slithering and blundering and sticky. “Heart of hemispheres unwound.”

I could explain how this music is not for everyone, but to say it belongs to anyone but Antediluvian themselves seems bizarre. Logos — the scripture, the ground, the exegesis of an outward and unknowable — literally impossible to accurately translate through such meager means, and I don’t if know if they try. They speak in tongues couched in the common language of death metal, perversely attached to such unflattering, brutal idiom. It would all be some sort of sad joke, if the music wasn’t so blessed. I feel uncomfortable writing words I can’t stand behind. I want nothing more than to say this: it’s imperfect, but it’s alive, dank and uncomfortable.

Nothing could be further from the truth: music. Some act better than others; some lies more subtly than the rest. But how to judge the veracity of this.To coax sounds from an unliving form, to bleed the sound from the naked, the objectiveless. The sound would be there already, exist whether we knew it or not: around us on our way to work; as she sips her coffee; as he stares at the patch of skin where her shirt pulls up just so slightly. Mundanity brought into focus through microphones, Haco and Toshiyo Tsunoda alive and charting the cross sections. All of this sound in TramVibration sectioned and parsed from, “a tram on a round trip from Ebisu-cho to Hamadera Ekimae on the Hankai Line.“ But now weedling its way across my apartment: Vibration. Expanse. I wish I could preserve it, as if in amber, or tucked into shadow along my wrist. But it dies alone. And I can only hit repeat, placate the thoughts that I should probably be playing with my cat, cooking food, or just– this. Frost on my window.